Brice Erickson, Assistant Professor, Classics
Areas of Interest and Specialization
Greek Archaeology, Cretan History, Ceramic studies, Athenian empire and ideology in the Classical period
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Borimir Jordan, Professor, Classics
Areas of Interest and Specialization
Greek history and literature (especially prose), Greek religion, Greek epigraphy.
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John W.I. Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of History
research interests: Greek warfare and society, Athenian democracy
archaeological interests: ancient walls and fortifications, Greek epigraphy, Greek city planning and intra-urban warfare (esp. Olynthus in northern Greece)
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Jo-Ann Shelton, Professor, Classics
Areas of Interest and Specialization:
Roman Social and cultural history; Attitudes toward animals in the ancient and modern world; Roman and Greek tragedy; Roman epistolography.
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Stuart Tyson Smith, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Smith's research interests include imperialism and culture contact between ancient Egypt and Nubia (Egypt's southern neighbor), legitimization and ideology, funerary practice and the social and economic dynamics of ancient Egypt and Nubia. His methodological focus is on the study of ancient pottery, including the scientific analysis of absorbed residues in ancient potsherds to reconstruct what people ate thousands of years ago.
Smith has worked on five archeological expeditions to Egypt, including the Nile Delta, Middle Egypt, and Luxor's Theban Necropolis. He currently leads a new dig in Sudanese Nubia as Director of the UCSB Dongola Reach Expedition, which recently discovered the pyramid tomb of a colonial administrator named Siamun and his wife Weran. Combining archaeology and physical anthropology, this project examines the conquest of Egypt's first
African rival, the Kerman kingdom of Kush, in c. 1500 BC, and the subsequent rise of the powerful and sophisticated Napatan state, which turned the tables on its former conquerors and became Egypt's 25 Dynasty in c. 750 BC.
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Christine M. Thomas, Associate Professor, Religious Studies
My research to date has been organized around alternate modes of perception and communication that underlie or overturn textual modes: the orality present even in ancient written texts, and the spatial and visual registers that result in the artifacts we dig out of the ground, even those which are textual (epigraphic). I have and will continue to publish such artifacts, which give us information about the religions of groups of people hidden from the textual world: women, shepherds, peasants, former slaves. On a more theoretical level, I am fleshing out a response to a persistent conundrum: the genesis of archaeological study was the desire to know more about earliest Christianity (St. Helena). Yet the employment of archaeology to study the religions of this period lags far behind, in theoretical sophistication, its use in other fields (and other periods). Put briefly, archaeological data is still being used to illustrate texts, rather than understood as representing independent modes of communication that are fundamentally non-textual.
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Mattanjah S. de Vries, Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Research interests:
Our research combines a number of advanced techniques for a novel approach to the study of individual molecules. We use short laser pulses to lift molecules from surfaces (laser desorption). Those molecules are subsequently photoionized by several more lasers. The resulting ions are detected with a mass spectrometer. There are two directions to this research: (1) There are state of the art analytical applications, made possible by the fact that we can analyze fragile organics. (2) It is possible for the first time to study relatively large molecules in the gas phase. We are particularly interested in applying our rather unique analytical capabilities to the study of archeological artifacts. Possibilities include analysis of food residues in potteries, source studies by chemical fingerprinting of, for example, pigments, and studies of chemical compositions of materials.
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Fikret K. Yegül, Professor, History of Art and Architecture
Fikret Yegül is an architectural historian specializing in Roman art and architecture; he has long worked on the Sardis Archaeological Expedition.
archaeology-related research:
Temple of Artemis at Sardis. Architectural documentation; minor excavations and investigations; drawings and documentation. Research, analysis of design, building history. Folio publication planned. Project started in 1988. He is the principal investigator.Anatolian Urbanism. Greco-Roman cities of Asia Minor, especially under Roman rule. Planning traditions, especially the non-Hippodamian types. Emphasis on southwest Anatolia, Caria, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia. Several articles and essays already published on the subject.
Vitruvius. A psychoanalytical reading. Rough text for an article prepared in 1998 and subject presented in a public lecture.
Roman Baths and Bathing. Has a contract for a medium-size, general access book on this subject. No footnotes, just a broad, generous narrative on this important cultural slice of antiquity. A previous work on this subject, Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity, received the 1994 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians.
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